Students with Disabilities Find Independence with ILE

Students with disabilities at Bryce Valley High School are now using Imagine Learning English with great success. Behavior problems are decreasing, scores are soaring, and confidence is on the rise. Special education teacher Phoebe Wiseman believes Imagine Learning English has helped her students gain greater confidence.

“They’ve found a place,” says Wiseman. “They’ve got something where they can put on earphones, and they can have this independent time where they’re learning at their own level--and they’re succeeding at their own level. They don’t have to be like the child next to them; they don’t have to be like the students in the other classes. They can just spend that time gaining for themselves. And because of that, they’re doing overall better in school."

Click here to see what high school special education teachers and coordinators are saying about Imagine Learning English.

April Fool's Day!

What other day of the year do major websites, newspapers, and corporations have the excuse to spread laughable hoaxes? (One of my favorites was a few years ago when Google announced a new service: Gmail Paper, because, as they said, “Whatever happened to stamps, filing cabinets, and the mailman?”) What other day can coworkers, kids, students, and parents get away with playing harmless pranks on each other? Though no one’s exactly sure how April Fool’s Day started, now it’s a holiday celebrated in many parts of the world with the aim to trick, fool, and get a few good laughs.

Are you looking for a good way to celebrate April Fool’s day in your classroom? We've got some ideas.

Utah Students Love ILE

On February 27, the Daily Herald published an article about how Utah teachers are using Imagine Learning English (ILE) to help their English learner population. Click the picture below for the full article and to see what students are saying about their experiences on Imagine Learning English.

Three Hot Keys to Help You Pause, Stop, or Get Loud

Hot keys are quick commands you access on your keyboard to make everything go faster. With the press of a button, you can switch from one browser to another, copy all the text on a page, or tell your printer to start printing. 

There’s a hot key for just about anything, and Imagine Learning English has its fair share of hot keys to help you function faster. Read on to find the secret steps of how to pause the program, stop a session, and bring up the volume.

Five Best Practices You Need to Know

If your students used Imagine Learning English in 2009, you already know the difference thirty minutes a day can make. Now we've got a few extra tips to help them excel even more. Start off the new year by trying these five best practices that are sure to help meet your best expectations.

Denver's Turnaround Strategy

Imagine Learning English is now an important part of Denver Public School District's turnaround strategy. At Place Bridge Academy, students come from 40 different countries and need intensive language training. The following news clip shows students using Imagine Learning English to help bolster those skills.

Writing with ELs

Writing may seem like the last step in language and literacy development, but according to Katharine Samway’s book When English Language Learners Write, research shows just the opposite. Young children, whether native English speakers or not, can begin to write before being able to read and even before being orally fluent. Of course, children understand more than they are able to write, but even English learners are fully capable of expressing complex thoughts in writing.

With this in mind, we’ve searched for ways to help your ELs get their thoughts out on paper. Whether your students have never before picked up a pen or they’ve already got the basics down, this list of research-based writing activities has something for everyone.

Tell Me an ExposiStory: Transitioning from Narrative to Expository Texts

Nothing captures a child’s attention like a good story—if only expository texts could hold the same attention. Starting in the fourth grade, and continuing into adulthood, informational texts are the most prevalent texts your students will encounter. How can you prepare them to comprehend exposition and enjoy the experience?

What's New 2009

While summer slowly closes its doors, schools across the country open theirs to a new year. Because we want this year to be your best yet, we've worked hard to make Imagine Learning English even better with new activities for students and functionality for teachers and administrators. Take a look at this sampling of new features below, click here for more information on these features, or click here to view an online demo.

Pick It Apart: How to Teach Word Parts and Why

Un. Re. In. Dis. Learn the meaning of these four prefixes, and you've just unlocked the meaning to over 1500 new words. It's no wonder vocabulary development experts, including Patricia M. Cunningham of the What Really Matters series, stress the importance of learning your prefixes and suffixes.

Teach and Enchant: Using Chants with English Language Learners

They’re jazzy. They’re catchy. And most importantly, they’re memorable. Jazz chants were developed by Carolyn Graham, an ESL expert from the American Language Institute at NYU, in order to reinforce language conventions and the proper intonation of English. Students learn lyrics quickly by connecting English's natural rhythm to a catchy jazz beat. And the lyrics stick.

History Speaks

What do Mount St. Helens's eruption, Lewis and Clark's expedition, and masking tape's invention have in common?

They each had famous beginnings in May. And not only that--we've got just the tools to make these historically significant events come alive in your classroom. Each event can be paired with one of our beautifully illustrated leveled texts and lead to some meaningful classroom discussion. Read on for instructions on accessing the texts and a list of topics worth talking about. Then let history speak for itself.

Oral Reading Records

In the early 1970s, Dr. Marie Clay introduced the idea of oral reading records: While a child reads to you, take note of any words that are omitted, substituted, self-corrected, or cause hesitation. This information, along with the amount of time it takes for the child to complete the task, helps inform a teacher on what strategies students already use.

Though informative and helpful, these records can be difficult to maintain. You don’t often have the time to sit next to every student in the class as he or she reads an entire book. And with “teacher” by their side, tallying mistakes, some students feel enough anxiety to skew their scores.

Teaching Poetry

Roses are red… and some poetry is stale. Celebrate April, also National Poetry Month, with a return to creativity.

Check out these classroom-friendly ideas on how to teach some of the more fun, lesser-celebrated poetry forms, including free verse, cinquain, and tankas.

Language Mag Meets ILE

Imagine Learning English is making headlines! Language Magazine, the journal of communication and education, featured Imagine Learning English in their TESOL edition.

This four-page spread discusses RTI, its history, downfalls and successes, and how ILE is helping schools nationwide with their struggling readers and English learners. Check out this link and then click "Responding to Intervention" to read the full article.

Getting Familiar with RTI

There's been talk of a new player in the educational ring, and you'd do well to get yourself acquainted. If you haven't already, it's time you met RTI.

RT-what, you ask? RTI, or Response to Intervention, is all the buzz in the education world this year. And that's because it's bringing results. Good ones. The basic mantra of RTI is to monitor student response to the intervention methods you're using and then take action if students aren't responding well. While each school implements RTI in a stylized way, there are four basic components that are key to effective intervention. This month, we'll examine the first three and how Imagine Learning English meets each requirement.

Bring Difficult Narrative to Life

You wouldn’t give your 4th graders Tolstoy or Dostoevsky to tackle. And why not? They’d be left in the wake of complex sentences and compounds. So how can you avoid putting that same burden on your struggling readers and English Learners (ELs)?

While you may not be giving your ELs War and Peace, the transition from picture books to early readers to chapter books can seem equally daunting. If you’re looking to make difficult narrative more accessible, take a look at these research-based, helpful hints for the whole class.

The Glossary that Talks Back

Fifty years ago, multiple-choice tests were graded by hand, not scanned. Overhead projectors ruled the classroom, and PowerPoint or interactive whiteboards only ruled our dreams. When students didn’t understand a word, they slogged through the monstrous, pedestaled dictionary in the library or lost their place to seek out a glossary in the back. And when they didn’t understand the definition, it most certainly wouldn’t talk back.

Well those days are gone, and glossaries are silent no more! The interactive glossary words in Imagine Learning English give students up to six new pieces of information to help them grasp the meaning and context. To find out exactly how this glossary is talking back (no disrespect here), read on.

5 New Interactions

1. Definition Audio: What good is a definition if you can’t read all the words? Just in case students are unsure of a word, we make sure each definition is read aloud, so students can easily follow along.
2. First-language Translation: For those students who have a wider vocabulary in their first-language, each glossary word is translated and read out loud.
3. Part of Speech: No glossary would be complete without this helpful information. Students become more familiar with how nouns, verbs, adjectives, and adverbs function as they see more examples of each.
4. Illustration: For those visual learners, definitions and translations might not cut it. Just in case the meaning still escapes them, we’ve included illustrations for every glossary word possible.
5. Extra Information: To make sure students get a deeper understanding of each word, we include synonyms and antonyms and identify idioms and compound words.

When students read leveled text, glossary words are bold and clickable. At any time, they may click a glossary word to learn more about it. And the best part? ILE holds their place in the story, so students don’t have to. Going five steps beyond the traditional glossary, the ILE interactive glossary allows students to get past the vocabulary and into some meaning.

Note: You can explore the interactive glossary through the Level 2 Activity Menu. Click "Reading Fluency and Comprehension" on the left and then the "Leveled" Listen and Read icon. Open any book and you'll see glossary words in bold. Click any glossary word to explore its meaning.

Go Graphic

Literacy all begins with letters and sounds. But after learning to recognize letters, then words, then phrases, sentences, and even paragraphs, a student’s journey is still far from over. It’s time to make some meaning out of it all. Time for connections. Time to go graphic.

Each of our new forty-four leveled texts come with a graphic organizer, found conveniently in your Level 2 Resource Guide. Graphic organizers teach students not only how to organize ideas but how to find ideas and meaning in the first place. And according to the April 2007 Reading in a Foreign Language article by scholars Xiangying Jiang and William Grabe, graphic organizers are especially helpful for English learners, who struggle with meaning more than their native-speaking counterparts. Check out the type of graphic organizers we use and how you can incorporate them into your curriculum.

1. Compare and Contrast
2. Sequence/Timeline
3. Main Idea and Supporting Detail
4. Information Table
5. Story Map
6. Cause and Effect
7. Problem/Solution

Struggling readers are likely to see the same text structures over and over without even realizing it. Says Jiang and Grabe, "the limited variety of discourse structures and their recurrence across texts enable teachers to provide explicit instruction to students in text structure knowledge, and students, once familiarized with the major textual patterns, can transfer their knowledge across texts and content areas." Graphic organizers make these text patterns more accessible, so students find meaning easier.

Download a sample graphic organizer here:

Making Resolutions Reality

Another year has come and gone. And so have last year’s resolutions. That’s not to say you didn’t have some great ideas—even the greatest intentions fail without the right plan of action. But if one of your goals this year is to get your students learning, reading, and loving it all… well, we’ve got just the game plan to make your resolution a reality.

Take a look at yet another study that demonstrates students who use Imagine Learning English test better and learn more than students who don’t. Then renew your resolve to put your ELs on Imagine Learning English everyday. Because if you make time in 2009—Imagine Learning English will make results.

ClearVue Research Independent Assessment Study Research Results for an Illinois School District:

1. Kindergarten students using Imagine Learning English had a median improvement in the pretest to posttest ISEL score of 40%. In comparison, kindergarten students without Imagine Learning English gained less than 20% during the pretest to posttest period.
2. First grade students had a median improvement in their pretest to posttest ISEL composite scores of over 30%; while first grade students without Imagine Learning English gained 15%.
3. An additional measure of year-to-year differences validates the increased benefit of Imagine Learning English: Kindergarten ISEL pretest to posttest scores from the 2005-2006 school year (before Imagine Learning English was implemented) had a median improvement of 22% compared with the 40% growth achieved by Imagine Learning English students the following year (2006-2007).
4. Imagine Learning English has a gap-narrowing effect. Students selected to receive Imagine Learning English were the most needy as evidenced by pre-test scores. However, post-test scores show that this gap is narrowed considerably due to the progress of Imagine Learning English students.

And Illinois isn't the only state seeing these results. English learners across the country are closing the learning gap with Imagine Learning English. So while we can't help you with your other New Year's Resolutions, we can help your students with literacy and comprehension. This year, be sure to put Imagine Learning English on your priority list.